Lucas Industries' Semiconductor Products


Lucas Industries were a major 20th century British electrical manufacturer, supplying Automotive and Aerospace sectors. At one point they had 93,000 employees and 27 sites in the UK.

Semiconductor manufacturing likely started in the early 1960s at the Mere Green Road site in Sutton Coldfield. Many Lucas sites were based in the Birmingham and West Midlands area.

The Mere Green Road site didn't produce any Germanium products, they started with Silicon. They produced a range of low power transistors and diodes, then moved into power transistors. On the same site they manufactured Hybrid package products for both Automotive and Aerospace. The above photo is from the mid 1980s and shows semiconductor workers.

The DT1602 devices are npn transistors with low gains (hfe= 7 & 20).


Comments

  1. Anonymous16 January 2023 at 13:01

    When I started at Lucas Semiconductors, Mere Green in 1979, I did ask my boss if they had manufactured any germanium devices but he said they had only ever done silicon because of the high temperature performance required in automotive applications. He then went on to show me a 1 inch diameter wafer that they had grown for earlier devices. My first project involved the move from 2 inch to 3 inch wafers for diode production which was the main activity. The transistors did have fairly low gain but a lot of the applications were for transistor
    amplifiers for ignition where a still significant current was required to keep contact breakers clean so in the early days perhaps gain was not too important. Anyway during my time, most of the transistor activity was on high voltage Darlington devices.

    ReplyDelete
  2. jamo spingal17 January 2023 at 06:20

    Thanks for your inputs. Do you have a rough idea when silicon production started ?

    ReplyDelete

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